If you can answer that question, then it says something about the usefulness of bitcoin without MtGox.

Yeah MtGox was big, and this will almost certainly cause bitcoin to take a slide, but there are other exchanges, and Bitcoin is bigger than just MtGox. My prediction: bitcoin will drop a lot, then slowly recover as other exchanges take the load and people see that this is not, in fact, the end of the world.

Here we have a large brokerage that shuts down, but changes in the value of bitcoin are largely unaffected except temporarily by the news, and everything remains stable despite a large market share being removed from the market. How will this change when users gain access to their accounts and finally settle at a loss is unknown. But the value of the underlying currency is both an interesting sounding board for this type of data, and in terms of technical chart analysis, an interesting point of stability. F

Yes, in a rigged market, the price is controlled and doesn't drop on very bad news. You can contrast that with a free market like housing which took a drop after Lehman shut down.

Those two objects are not correlated. The housing market collapsed because of bad debt that was loaded into paper held by banks, and Lehman happened to have some of the paper too. Note that Lehman was allowed to collapse because the impact to the housing market was a non-event. The impact to the US as a whole, and the housing market secondarily, by the bankruptcy of all solvent banks was much greater. And so we entered into a time when the government took a stake in the stock market and financial institutions.

MT and BTC are the same scenario, luckily the US Govt has not stepped in yet. Which means the market is actually free.

Much of the value attributed to Bitcoin comes from the perception that it can be traded, easily, for traditional currency, and how do you do that? Well, the main place to do it is (was) MtGox.

If you hold a stock that trades on the NYSE, part of its value is that NYSE market. When stocks fall off the major exchanges onto "the pink sheets," they almost invariably lose value just from the de-listing.

The MtGox failure is worse, it's like a bank failure - your coins are in there, but can you get them out now?

Regardless of history, it is true that Bitcoin is "just another cryptocurrency" and MtGox is "just another exchange" but, they are both significant brands in their space, and perception of them will weigh heavily on all similar cryptocurrencies and exchanges, regardless of "reality."

Well, the main place to do it is (was) MtGox.No it wasn't and hasn't been for a long time

Spoken like a truly "hip" trader of 'coin.

Value doesn't come from you guys, value comes from the unwashed masses who see a story on CNN and say "how can I get in on this Bitcoin thing?" Where, until very recently, would they end up placing their first buy order?

Value doesn't come from you guys, value comes from the unwashed masses who see a story on CNN and say "how can I get in on this Bitcoin thing?" Where, until very recently, would they end up placing their first buy order?

Coinbase. It's a US company with a strong fiduciary angle.

Not an exchange in the many-to-many sense, but you can still buy Bitcoin there. And that's where a lot of new Bitcoin purchasers are getting them.

Precisely. And now those folks are scared shitless to even think about it. That's what the "everything is gonna be okay, folks!" wishful thinkers are missing here. It doesn't matter if it's rational or not - who the hell ever said investing/gambling was rational. Regardless of anything else, this was a big huge warning to those masses that told them to stay as far away from BitCoin as possible.

That's why this is the beginning of the end - some folks who have been mildly curious, or who haven't even re

Back in the day when a coin was $5 (I actually had one of those...), I think you would have been right - if MtGox had imploded then, in this fashion, it could have tailspun the whole thing into non-existence.

Not that Bitcoin is now "too big to fail," but I think that enough people are deeply enough invested into it at this point to rationalize their fears away and carry on - and probably invest a little bit in educating the world about how "it's really not as scary as all that." That education/pr campaign

Let it be a warning to anyone dealing with bitcoin - don't store it in a "bank" that lacks bank-grade security. Doing so just means your coins have been combined with a bunch of others to make a much more tempting target.

"Sir, you may take comfort in your currency being cryptographically unforgeable and protected against double spending. However, sir is advised not to bank at financial establishments that are currently on fire, under attack by anonymous militants, or run by con men. Enjoy your stay."

That is a pretty nasty accusation to make without any evidence. They were taking a fee on every transaction, making money.

Now maybe somebody on the inside did it, but I doubt highly that it was the owners.

Also bitcoins are regulated just like anything else. If that is what they did, it was still illegal because it was still fraudulent. Stealing or defrauding people out of bitcoins is every bit as illegal and regulated as anything else you would like to steal from them or defraud them out of.

It was. It hasn't been for over a year, which is an eternity for Bitcoin. Everyone involved in Bitcoin has known for a very long time that putting money into MtGox is extremely high risk. And when someone involved in Bitcoin says "high risk", it means something.

But what you are missing is that to the masses out there that BitCoin needs to keep buying into the base of the pyramid to make current Bitcoins worth anything in the real world, MtGox is the onky exchange they have ever heard of, and first impressions may not be everything but they sure count for a lot. You guys who buy into this are missing the overall point - BitCoin has had more mainstream press over this than every before and it's all negative, terrible news. Most folks aren't going to get involved e

That's entirely subjective and also controversial. It's true that lots of people who have heard of Bitcoin have also heard of Mt Gox, but we have no reason to believe that a significant number of them used Mt Gox, do we?

You might as well say Russia is a large part of the Olympics brand. That's true and also not true, depending on how you're choosing to look at things.

Much of the value attributed to Bitcoin comes from the perception that it can be traded, easil

> To be honest, MtGox hasn't been the main place to trade for at least half a year.

To be honest, I have been kind of busy with other stuff and only peripherally following bitcoin recently. However a friend of mine, who also has a few, has been following a bit more closely and, for at least the past few months, this is what he has been saying.

Long before the MtGox issues cropped up publically, they stopped being the largest exchange by volume.

Yeah MtGox was big, and this will almost certainly cause bitcoin to take a slide, but there are other exchanges, and Bitcoin is bigger than just MtGox. My prediction: bitcoin will drop a lot, then slowly recover as other exchanges take the load and people see that this is not, in fact, the end of the world.

That's basically what has happened over the last couple of days. After the joint statement on the insolvency of Mt. Gox [siliconangle.com], the Bitcoin price dove to ~$400, but started to recover not long after; it's now

That's basically what has happened over the last couple of days. After the joint statement on the insolvency of Mt. Gox [siliconangle.com], the Bitcoin price dove to ~$400, but started to recover not long after; it's now back up to ~$600, which isn't far from where it was before the most recent round of nonsense.

Mt. Gox is only the beginning. Once the script-kiddies get around to it then anything of value that can be stolen electronically from ordinary PCs is toast.

CAVirtEx allows you to do a direct conversion of Canadian dollars, debited directly from your bank account to a bitcoin wallet address of your choice. The site never holds the funds and the transfer is nearly instant. This is how it should be done.

Always think of an online wallet as asking some stranger to hold your money and promise to give it back. We're used to this idea because traditional banks are federally regulated and insured, but without those protections it's a terribly foolish practice. The only reason to let someone else hold your money would be if they could do so more securely and with a reasonable guarantee. Online wallets/exchanges can provide neither.

You are right to be sarcastic but you are dead wrong in conflating volatility risk with counterparty risk. The two are actually completely orthogonal -- you can have very little risk of volatility but high counterparty risk, or high/low (and high/high low/low for that matter).

The key is to distinguish from the risk inherent in the fulfillment of the contract and the risk that the contract will not be carried out.

This is a very simple situation. It's no different from an uninsured bank failing.

But you can also steal bitcoins by getting access to someone's wallet, just like you could steal cash by getting access to someone's wallet. Once you spend them, they can't be spent again. The system doesn't know that they didn't arrange to give them to you offline.

Bitcoin was fine these guys were idiots and left a gaping hole in the exchange API. Sending your bitcoin to somebody else to hold for you is not a good idea security wise. The transactions can not be undone and there is no state run insurance backing it so they can and will loose your bitcoin.

You load your friend you car and he promises to take care of it.You sell your car to a person not your friend.You ask your friend for the car back. He can't or won't give it back to you to deliver to the buyer.

You type out a lame car analogyYou suspect that it is not actually correctYou like to appear knowledgeable and witty, yetYou didn't secure your Bitcoin walletYou are in quite a predicament, and how?Your Bitcoins are all belong to me now.

There's a budding market in Ford turn indicator lenses - they're exposed to unusually high levels of breakage and common across a large number of models, and the supplier that makes them is having labor troubles, something about the paperwork required to certify them for use growing exponentially.

So, some guy sets up an overseas depot that makes a market in these turn indicator lenses, they'll hook up buyers and sellers of the lenses and allow the market to find its own price point. Fo

Let's say you deposit your retirement money at the Bonnie and Clyde savings and loan. They then take that money and move to Mexico and use it for their retirement. They may or may not use a car to get there. Either way, you're never going to see that money again.

I don't understand Bitcoins in general, but I *really* don't understand the process where they could be stolen. Could someone please explain it? Car analogies OK.

Just about any scenario where money is held as cash or a deposit in a bank account could apply equally to Bitcoin. You give a stack of $100 bills to a bank, they give you a slip of paper showing they have your money and will give it back when you ask. If the bank president or a crooked teller then puts everyone's stacks of $100 bills in a suitcase and disappears, your slip of paper isn't worth much.

In the case of the Pirateat40, it was a classic Ponzi scheme. The fact that it was done with Bitcoins instead of pieces of paper with pictures of dead Presidents and statesmen on them doesn't change much.

So, the reason for my question is that when I first heard about this, it was presented as a theft by an entity outside of Mt. Gox. These explanations seem like it was inside job. Is that the thinking now?

The question is whether you trust Mt. Gox enough to believe that. Other possibilities are:

1. Someone at Mt. Gox stole the money2. Mt. Gox itself was just a confidence trick designed to steal peoples' money.3. Mt. Gox was a Ponzi scheme that is now unraveling.4. Mt. Gox was essentially a legitimate bank, but was run too incompetently to maintain solvency in the face of market fluctuations, and they're now lying to cover up their incompetence.5. Even the people at Mt. Gox don't know what's going on and have self-servingly decided on an explanation that puts the blame on someone else.

As far as I understood, the Mt. Gox' API had a hole, which allowed customers to withdraw money without it showing up in Mt. Gox's books. Some customers noticed, and overdid it so much that no money was left to honour the other (honest) customers' accounts.

The feeling on reddit and bitcointalk is that it was due to unbelievable incompetence by MtGox and not an inside job. They wrote their withdrawal code to throw money away over and over and they didn't audit their accounts for years. They also lied to cover up their losses for maybe a couple of years.

My understanding, which is admittedly pretty shallow regarding BTC, is that essentially the attackers created 2 transactions, but that Mt Gox saw one. The 2 transactions used the same transaction ID, which is the only thing that Mt Gox used to uniquely identify a transaction, when they should have been using more information (to, from, timestamp, amount, etc).

Basically, the attacker would send say 1000 BTC, and then show another transaction with the same ID where they receive 1000 BTC. The first transacti

One difference, most US "banks" that little kids are told are safe to put their money in have a little sticker in the window that says "FDLC insured" - meaning that your little slips of paper are not only backed by the bank, but also by the government.

They weren't always FDIC insured. Not too long ago they were not insured at all, so you would only put money in banks that you trusted. These banks still sometimes would fail. FDIC insurance came about to eliminate the fear of a bank collapsing. One day a bit coin exchange/bank may be FDIC (or similar) insured, but probably the whole thin will collapse first.

Funny, on the other end of this thread, I've got people telling me how MtGox hasn't been the "go-to" exchange for nearly six months now - an eternity in Bitcoin time.

I think FDIC came around in the 1930s - well before my parents were born in any case.

And that was after how many years of the banks not being FDIC insured? If you only go back to the founding of the US (since FDIC is a US thing) that's still about 150 years. And of course banking as a concept goes back quite a bit farther than that.

One difference, most US "banks" that little kids are told are safe to put their money in have a little sticker in the window that says "FDIC insured" - meaning that your little slips of paper are not only backed by the bank, but also by the government.

Actually that slip of paper is worth quite a bit with most US Banks. FDIC insurance will cover the losses to your account unless you're keeping some absurd amount in a single account. And the receipt is proof that you did do a deposit. Similarly a receipt in a cash transaction allows for legal recourse if the person you're doing business with is a thief though not as much as if it were a bank. Unregulated entities, and Bitcoin in general offers very few of the legal protections normal transactions offer.

Just about any scenario where money is held as cash or a deposit in a bank account could apply equally to Bitcoin. You give a stack of $100 bills to a bank, they give you a slip of paper showing they have your money and will give it back when you ask. If the bank president or a crooked teller then puts everyone's stacks of $100 bills in a suitcase and disappears, your slip of paper isn't worth much.

In the case of the Pirateat40, it was a classic Ponzi scheme. The fact that it was done with Bitcoins instead of pieces of paper with pictures of dead Presidents and statesmen on them doesn't change much.

This would be a good analogy if you substituted "some guy in an alley" for "bank".

"Just about any scenario where money is held as cash or a deposit in a bank account could apply equally to Bitcoin. You give a stack of $100 bills to a bank, they give you a slip of paper showing they have your money and will give it back when you ask. If the bank president or a crooked teller then puts everyone's stacks of $100 bills in a suitcase and disappears, your slip of paper isn't worth much."

Incorrect. A crooked bank teller would be put into prison and bank would have to compensate you. In the case of a crooked bank president the _government_ (or state-run bank insurance organization like FDIC) would have to compensate you.

The classic banking system evolved for a LONG time to minimize the effects of bank failures and bad bank employees. Besides, it's almost impossible to actually _steal_ money from a bank. Sure, you can rob a bank and maybe get a couple hundred thousands in cash. But stealing

It's like someone came up to their car siphoned off some gas. Then rather than report that the tank was half empty they ran things as if everything as "ok". As long as people kept putting in gas no one would be the wiser. But when people started taking their gas back, and stopped putting more gas in the tank eventually ran empty before it should have.

Ether it was deliberate theft on part of MTGOX that was done to effectively make a ponzi scheme. It could have been a theft from unrelated parties, and MTGOX lied to effectively create a ponzi scheme to hide the damage. Or, somehow, it was theft from unrelated parties, and MTGOX was blissfully unaware until it all came crashing down.

For a simplistic explanation, think of Bitcoins as golden coins.
You can own gold coins/bitcoins physically (keep gold coin in your pocket or keep BTC private keys in your posession). You can also relinquish your gold coin to the bank and have a bank note stating that they owe you a gold coin.
In terms of Bitcoin, MtGox acted as a de-facto bank, where BTC owners gave away (or transfered) BTC to Mt Gox and had a false sense of security that their assets were "there". MtGox victims basically entrusted their private key to the third party (MtGox).
Now, let's assume, the bank who kept gold was robbed, by someone who dig to the vaults and silently removed gold. The bank kept telling you that, according to their records, you still are the owner of the gold, while in reality they would not be in position to repay you. MtGox did the same thing: their real assets were stolen, while their "paper" records were showing existence of the BTC.
This is a simplistic explanation, but, to be sure gold/bitcoins did not just disappear. They only sit in the possession of other owners.

I don't understand Bitcoins in general, but I *really* don't understand the process where they could be stolen. Could someone please explain it? Car analogies OK.

A car analogy? Sure. You're a classic car collector. Because storing and securing your classic cars is such a pain, you decide to entrust them to a business that is fairly well known and respected in the hobby. This business, for a modest fee, says they will keep your classic cars in a secure garage, and also let you sell them to other collectors who are customers of the same service without having to physically move them.

For a while all this works OK. People deposit their cars for safekeeping, they withdraw their cars, they trade them, everything is fine. A few mix-ups and glitches, but nothing out of the ordinary for a business of this size. Then at some point there's a "security problem" that keeps people from taking their cars back. The business says it's because of some kind of flaw in the software they use to track them, but they're working on getting it fixed. They give a date. The date comes and goes, and people still can't get their cars back. The CEO of the company gives excuses – he can't talk about what actually happened, but he promises everything will be OK if the collectors just give him a bit more time. There are complicated issues, but no, your cars haven't been stolen, pinky swear!

Eventually a hobbyist organization that this CEO is a member of decides to kick him out, and puts out an announcement saying that his company is insolvent – as everyone suspected for some time now, he doesn't have the cars he was supposed to be keeping in safe storage for his customers. No one knows where they went, who has them now, or if the theft was internal or external.

And because this company was holding ~6% of all the classic cars in existence, it's kind of a big deal.

Nice analogy... if you want a real world example of this happening, consider the storage facilities for fine wine in Manhattan-- flooded during hurricane SandyFor (largely unexplained) reasons the storage facilities still won't allow the customers access to (or even look at) the wine they're supposedly storing...

You are a car rental agency and your customer comes to get the car they reserved. The customer pays and drives off with the car. They return immediately afterward and says they haven't picked up the car yet. Because of a deficiency in the paperwork, the checkout person doesn't realize that a car has already been provided but sees that its paid for and provides a second car. Turns out the customer has used a false identity and can also reissue VIN numbers and now has two cars for the price of one. You look out in the parking lot the next day and realize all your cars are gone and you only have half the money. Crap. Somebody had the nerve to take advantage of a problem in your paperwork system that has been publicly known for a couple years but you have been too lazy and irresponsible to correct.

Its pretty obvious that getting the transaction process fixed is the solution. All the exchanges have or are in the process of doing this. Its too late for Mt. Gox. They and their customers are screwed unless they can come up with a way to trace the funds through a byzantine scheme to mix and anonymize and retract the transactions. Building a warp drive star ship would likely be simpler...

There was a bug in the code whereby you could get MtGox to send out your bitcoins to your address, but rebroadcast the transaction under a different transaction ID. This mean when MtGox checked to see if their transaction worked, it looked like it hadn't (since the transaction ID didn't match.) They then re-sent you the bitcoins you already had received, giving you twice as much as they should have.

Apparently the bug has been there for years.

It's like getting a cheque, and changing the cheque number from 123 to 124. The new cheque still looks valid so it cashes fine, but you go back to the sender and complain you never got a cheque. They see cheque 123 was never cashed, and so write you a new one. You cash that one as well. At some point they should notice that they've paid out twice as much as they should have, but for MtGox they didn't notice this for a long time.

Thanks for the link. I find it especially interesting how careful you need to be to not risk getting robbed. See this email on the bitcoin dev list [sourceforge.net] for some details. Among other things, it permeates that the problems that bit MtGox haven't been solved conclusively.

Clearly, the average person on the street should stay clear of things like bitcoin, because you really have to understand the protocol and know exactly what you are doing. The folks at MtGox surely spent some t

At some point they should notice that they've paid out twice as much as they should have, but for MtGox they didn't notice this for a long time.

Which shows they're either absurdly incompetent or complicit. Validating the books is incredibly much easier with Bitcoin than regular money because nobody can forge the blockchain. Here's how much money our system thinks we have, here's how much the blockchain says we got and we're not even talking about an audit. We're talking about somebody keeping their own bank account record on a napkin listing deposits and withdrawals without ever checking with the bank what they say the balance is. Honestly, it does

So given that bitcoin transactions are all known why can't they trace a suffient number of these back to wither a source or to nullify the recipient's income?

that is even if the person doing it hid there tracks at some point they would have transacted those bit coins, possibly to some third party (e.g. to convert them to dollars or buy a pony). Or they might have transmitted them into some combined tumbler to anonymize the trail. But with real currency if I rob a bank and buy a car with the money the money can be seized from the car dealer if the cops so decide. With bit coin there's no mechanism to do that. The whole bitcoin ecosystem would have to agree to the seizure to unwind the transaction trail. It would also require a lot of new non-trivial calculations to do that back multiple years.

But in principle these transactions are at least tracebale. Perhaps the problem is it's international and Mt GOx doesn't have the resources to trace this?

It sounds like there is no audit process to ensure that transactions occur in a proper manner. Could this be happening at other exchanges and how easy is it to implement this bug without anybody noticing?

MtGox had been taking months to make payments and they had been doing this for about a year. They made bad excuse after bad excuse for this. They blatantly lied about the delays in support tickets. It was obvious that something was seriously wrong for around a year. I'm sorry for anyone that lost money but there were many obvious warning signs.

The whole world is better off without companies like MtGox. Good riddance to bad rubbish and may they be replaced with a competent outfit.

Yep. Bitcoin can still live, but we must start rigorously monitoring and rating the trust towards various exchanges. As you said, for Mt. Gox it was obvious that something was seriously wrong for around a year. That should have rung an alarm bell.

To play Bitcoin, you have to trust your Bitcoin exchanges. Those are BANKS, people. UNREGULATED banks!!! Banks have a history of really screwing depositors over when they're unregulated. Bank panics?? Why we have the FDIC?? Think about this for half a fucking second.

How do you know where "your" Bitcoins are right now?

One of the benefits of money is that it's backed up by a social superstructure (police, judiciary, the army, etc.). Bitcoin has none of that. You are on your own.

One of the benefits of money is that it's backed up by a social superstructure (police, judiciary, the army, etc.). Bitcoin has none of that. You are on your own.

Yes, and if you don't use it in the way they prefer, then police, the judiciary, and eventually the army will be used to force you to do so, or to punish you for doing otherwise. It's not all wine and roses.

One of the benefits of money is that it's backed up by a social superstructure (police, judiciary, the army, etc.). Bitcoin has none of that. You are on your own.

Yes, and if you don't use it in the way they prefer, then police, the judiciary, and eventually the army will be used to force you to do so, or to punish you for doing otherwise. It's not all wine and roses.

True, but Bitcoin does offer you much protection if it you use it in a way they don't like either; so you get all the downside of counterpart risk with no upside.

Yes, and if you don't use it in the way society prefers then police, the judiciary, and eventually the army will be used to force you to do so, or to punish you for doing otherwise. It's pretty much all wine and roses, as long as you can manage to follow some reasonably sensible rules.

Yes, society is a contract of cooperation and when you fight against general social norms, expect to be punished for it. What now, not fair? Who the hell said life was fair for everyone. I could cry for unborn babies aborted because their potential mothers didn't want them or for the thousands of cattle slaughtered every day, but I don't, and neither do I care about your disestablishmental libertarian views. Society as a whole could care less as well it seems.

That was a selling point not that long ago. People pitched bitcoin as the "Wild West", where fortunes could be made quickly using just your wits and some luck.

Most people don't realize that life in the actual wild west sucked. Banks failed all the time, losing people's life savings. People shot each other over mining claims, horses, or just drunken bar fights.

Simply incorrect. You could "play" Bitcoin easily without ever touching an exchange. Exchanges are used to... well exchange other currencies for Bitcoin. You can still provide goods and services for bitcoin, purchase goods and services with bitcoin, or mine bitcoin, without ever touching an exchange.

Also, the real issue with MTGox's collapse was not that it was a popular exchange, it was all the people who lost bitcoin because they were storing it there. Storing your money in an online wallet is not requ

To play Bitcoin, you have to trust your Bitcoin exchanges. (...) How do you know where "your" Bitcoins are right now?

In my wallet, which is on my machine. You can't get away from the transaction risk (that you'll send Bitcoins and not get dollars back or vice versa), but keeping it on an account they control is entirely optional and if they stopped processing transactions that'd get noticed really, really quick. Unlike real banks, you lose no interest and it's just as easy to transfer from my client as from an online website, as long as I'm on the machine where my wallet is. Of course the downside is that it's like hiding

When bitcoin hit $1000 each, all the talking head "experts" on CNBC were pushing it as an investment vehicle. It was then that I was positive the whole thing was a scam. After all, if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that just about anything recommended by CNBC is wrong.

(I don't have any but . ..) What is the advantage of putting all my Bitcoins in a Bitcoin bank?
I can see (for a few milliseconds while passing through) converting real works $$$'s to/from either a credit card or REAL bank account . . . into Bitcoins, then I KEEP the Bitcoins.

I thought that was part of the purpose/advantage of Bitcoins, they're Peer-to-Peer and need no bank.
It seems to me the only purpose of putting Bitcoins in a Bitcoin Bank . . . is to lose the

In the old days before the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, bank runs and collapses were common place. The FDIC and Federal Reserve were confidence measures, meant to reassure a weary public that their money was protected against fraud and the vagaries of fractional reserve lending. The true stability of those institutions in times of systemic crisis can be debated but they do serve their purpose for isolated failures. Bitcoin is going to need similar institutions to achieve mainstream adoption.

Of course, even that system was constricted by the gold standard, and governments ran out of money for bailouts during the depression. To really achieve mainstream adoption, Bitcoin will have to stop being deflationary, and allow a central authority to control the money supply in the event of a crisis. Bitcoin is great fun as a teaching tool, because it shows exactly why all of the institutions surrounding modern currencies have developed. Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, to the great amusement of everyone else.

It would have been fine if they'd kept it in their mattresses, but instead they gave it all to a guy who used to manage Magic The Gathering card swaps.

No, they didn't. They gave it all to a guy who bought the business of a Magic The Gathering card swaps side from its original programmers and organizers, extending the site as an afterthought for Bitcoins worth cents at the time.

It was easier to replace lost Bitcoins than cards in stock. MtGox committed the ultimate fault for any business plan: the one thing they had no contingency plan for was success. They had no clue how to patch up the holes in their inventory (or probably even how to take inventory)

You lost your fait assets. Anonymity is a double edged sword, you just felt the bad edge blow.

Do some research. Fiat is government issued currency and crypto currencies are not really all that anonymous. All transactions can be followed on the chain. The only trick is matching the wallet with a real person but that isn't impossible.

Forget the "non"anonymity of bitcoin. The problem is: every transaction becomes final. No reverse.

If i buy a apple, give a (real) coin, i expect a apple in return. If i do not get the apple, I will hold the counter party responsible. (e.g. beat him up/ call the police / etc etc.)

Now the counter party becomes the entire bitcoin public. I give a (fraction of) a bitcoin.... and I fail to get the apple. Now who do i beat up? Who do i call for? How do I tell that the reputation of the apple-seller is bad?

Yep. Gone. Poof. The people that lost out though were the ones who didn't do their research. MtGox had been delaying payments for months for about a year, you stay the hell away from companies like that.